


Sad Kittens

by Demenior, neinlives



Series: Cuddle House [3]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Feelings, Kittens, Multi, PTSD, Potential Spoilers, no the warning is kittens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-24
Updated: 2013-05-24
Packaged: 2017-12-12 20:07:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/815516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Demenior/pseuds/Demenior, https://archiveofourown.org/users/neinlives/pseuds/neinlives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marco hasn’t seen Jake in eight days.</p><p>Jake’s mom says she hasn’t seen him in eleven.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sad Kittens

**Author's Note:**

> So you know that adorable picture with the gorilla cuddling the kitten? That's what this started as. And then I somehow made cuddling kittens HORRIBLE AND FILLED WITH PAIN D: (but it does have a happy ending BECAUSE I SAY SO)

They all know something is wrong, after the war, but none of them quite grasp how wrong it is until it becomes less of an issue and more of The Issue. On the outside, Jake looks fine – he talks, he eats, he says that he sleeps (they all know he doesn’t, but neither do they, much). The war hits them all hard, but they all find ways to cope – they turn to their families, and Ax brings Tobias to meet his and they all still have each other. For the others, after months and months of hiding things from their parents and lying and being terrified for them, the chance to just leave everything bare in front of the people who raised them and receive only love back is what ties them down the most. They think it’s the same with Jake.

They haven’t seen Jake for a while. They’ve all been busy, catching up with their families, and when they do hang out its in ones and twos, because Jake always says he’s busy. Its probably the longest Marco or Rachel has gone in a long time without seeing him – but, he’s busy. Jake says he’s busy. So he’s busy.

Jake’s mom calls Marco, eventually. She wants to know if Jake is ever going to come back, or if he’s just planning on sleeping at Marco’s forever.

Marco hasn’t seen Jake in eight days.

Jake’s mom says she hasn’t seen him in eleven.

Marco panics and swears a lot, and then calls an emergency meeting – which works out well, because they were all going to meet and hear about Tobias’s visit to Ax’s world. In the end, Ax is the one who figures it out. Him and Tobias are freshly back on earth, and apparently Ax has been given a refresher in post-morphing PTSD, because halfway through Marco’s tearful (he’s freaking out, okay, Jake is his leader and his best friend and his occasional boyfriend and pretty much his everything) panic attack half-ass plan involving razing their newly-built city to the ground, he interrupts with a, {You’ll be able to feel him.}

Everyone stops.

{Feel him how?} Tobias asks from his perch on one of the rafters.

Ax turns to look at him. {I believe he’s lost control of one of his morph} he says, and his normally impassive voice is tight with concern. {We were warned against this, but it is so rare I’d forgotten.} He’s silent for a long moment, and then he says softly,{He would have had to almost let himself get stuck in it several times for it to happen.}

Marco feels like he got punched in the gut. “ _Stuck?!_ You mean, as in _Jake almost let the two hours run up_ stuck??”

Ax nods, and Marco can see his own pain reflected in the andelite’s eyes. {Yes.} He looks away again. {There are some…cases where warriors use the time limit to try and exert a feeling of control over their lives.} His eyes come back to rest on the group. {I believe similar practices are not uncommon in humans.}

“They’re not uncommon, but they’re not common in _Jake,_ ” Rachel snarls, inexplicably mad – maybe at herself, because where has she been all week? Home, snuggled between her sisters, happy. “Jake isn’t some _teenage girl with an eating disorder_ , alright?”

“Rachel,” Cassie admonishes softly, but her hand closes around the other girl’s arm in a silent squeeze of support. They’re all feeling the same thing. She turns back to Ax. “What do we do?”

{If he has lost control, we’ll just have to hope he’s managed to demorph in the past two hours,} Ax says gravely. {I believe Prince Jake would not yet let himself become a nothlit. If he is still able to morph, he will have to be fighting it, as his body will be trying to revert to this as a natural state.}

{How do we stop it?} Tobias asks, and the quiet vehemence in his voice is enough to rock everyone in the room out of their panicky inner dialogues. They all know they’ll kill for Jake. All of them.

Ax’s eyes sadly smile a little. {We talk him out of it.}

“First we fucking find him,” Marco snarls.

Rachel is already morphing. A few minutes later, five birds wing their way out of Cassie’s barn.

{He will be exuding his emotions, unable to control who he is speaking to,} Ax tells them as they split up. {I suggest battle morphs.}

{I suggest you shut up and look,} Rachel snaps back, but no one calls her on it. All of them feel as if they are breaking, somehow. They all had thought they had begun to heal, but now they realize that their lives are just as screwed up as they were during the war, that they are just as screwed up, and no amount of fawning from parents is going to fix that. Not in the long run.

The possibility that they have all failed, now, threatens to drown Marco even as he soars through updrafts that the pavement below has baked as dry as brittle bones. He is, unconsciously, heading towards the part of the city where the mall used to be. His memories there are no longer all good ones, but they’re no longer all good anywhere, it seems. And him and Jake had good memories there.

He finds Jake, but not by sight.

Jake’s misery hits him so hard Marco almost falls right out of the sky, and if Ax hadn’t told him that there was someone out there projecting negative emotions, he probably would have thought he was dying. He brakes, hard, and circles down to where he can feel Jake the strongest. He touches down and demorphs , and in the last second remembers Ax’s words. He hesitates, but he can feel that something is wrong. He knows something is wrong.

Marco morphs gorilla and starts down the stretch of cracked road, his knuckles crushing the dead stalks of grass in the ditch as he moves the only sound. There isn’t another living thing as far as Marco’s senses can detect, and the fact that even his gorilla morph feels like falling to the ground and weeping tells Marco why. Jake is here. Jake is definitely here.

A tiny tuft of fur in the gutter finally catches Marco’s eye, and he skitters over to it so fast he’s surprised he doesn’t fall. It’s a kitten, he sees as he nears it, lying on its side in the filth. A tiny, calico kitten, cradled between the cracked cement walls of the gutter, mud stuck to its paws and in its fur. It’s clearly the epicenter, he can feel it, and he knows this is Jake.

The kitten is dead.

It’s been dead for days.

Marco can’t see. He can’t see anything and he’s not sure he can even feel. The gorilla morph is making some kind of horrible, anguished noise, and he’s trying to stop because _someone is going to hear him someone is going to see Jake is going to kill him except Jake’s dead he’s dead he’s dead he’s…_

An almost silent noise breaks through.

Marco calms down in bits and pieces – his heartrate first, and suddenly he can hear more than his blood pounding in his ears, and then the rest. His sense of taste – he’s bitten through some part of his mouth and there’s blood and salt, and then he can feel – heat, pavement, a pain in the shoulder that hit the cement. He feels his hands. The gorilla’s muscles. His heart.

It’s crying. The sound is crying. A kitten, crying.

Marco opens his eyes.

The kitten in front of him is still dead, but there’s grass moving, and Marco’s heart leaps into his mouth. He pushes himself up so hard gravel scatters, and drags himself to the edge of the road.

A calico kitten, identical to the one beside him, totters out of the grass.

It’s alive.

It’s _alive._

{ _Jake,_ } Marco manages to croak, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been so happy.

The kitten is staring at him, still crying pitifully, and a wave of confusion hits Marco hard, the bewildered desperation of someone who’s only just realizing they’ve lost control. The kitten tumbles forward, unable to handle anything other than those seven steps it just took to pull itself out of the grass, and Marco wonders when the last time Jake ate was.

He wonders how long kittens can go without eating.

He wants Jake to be _his_ Jake, now.

Marco doesn’t even bother demorphing, doesn’t waste the precious seconds changing his opposable thumbs for smaller opposable thumbs when hello, they’re already opposable. He just leans forward and scoops the tiny ( _holy fucking hell_ kittens are tiny and gorillas are not tiny and he can’t do this, he can’t even do this) ball of fur up in one hand and cradles it to his chest .{Jake,} he pleads. {Come on man, demorph. You gotta get back, dude. Can you hear me? Jake?}

The confusion is stronger now, but there’s something else – it might be relief, but Marco is so full of relief right now he can’t really tell if any of its not his. {Jake, c’mon, buddy. Say something at least. Come on back, bud.}

The kitten has gone still now, has finally stopped crying, and it just staring back at Marco with wide brown eyes. The pieces of his heart that aren’t already broken are breaking, but he feels like he’s getting through. {Please…} If gorillas could cry, Marco would be crying. He might be crying anyways. {Jake, I need you, _please…_ }

There’s a radio silence suddenly, as the emotions being broadcast into the air between them disappear as suddenly as if they’d never been there, and Marco has a horrible moment where he thinks that this is what happens when you pass the marker – that Jake just ran out of time to demorph, right when he was so close, right when he was _there_ , and if Marco had been faster, just two seconds faster, he could have…

{…Marco?}

Marco is pretty sure Jake can hear him sobbing inside his head but he’s never been so relieved. The gorilla morph is keening and he’s rocking but he still manages. {Jake, demorph, please demorph, please, you can’t…}

The kitten closes its eyes for a second, and a shudder goes through Jake’s tiny form. {…hurts.}

{I know,}Marco gasps. {Jake, I know, but please, you can’t leave…} He takes a deep breath, composes himself. {Ax says it’s the morph. You’ve lost control of it. It’s trying to make this your default. You have to demorph, Jake. When did you morph this? How much time is left?}

Jake-kitten sways a little, and Marco almost reflexively tightens his grip before he realizes he’s a _gorilla_ and that’s a really bad idea. {Not much,} he mumbles, and Marco’s heart rate kicks up. Jake looks up at him again, his big brown kitten eyes wide and hurting, and he moans, {Marco…}

{I know,} Marco soothes. {I know.} He didn’t before, wasn’t listening hard enough to realize it, but now he knows. And he’s never, ever going to forget his best friend again. {Demorph, Jake.}

Jake is still for a long moment, and it must hurt, but then Marco hears the familiar sound of morphing begin and he almost cries again, because up until that second he still wasn’t sure Jake wasn’t stuck. It insanely hard to hold your best friend when his bones are the size of a kitten’s and he’s morphing and you’re a gorilla, but Marco is not putting him down. He is _so_ not putting him down.

“Marco…” Jake moans against him when he’s human again, his hands fisting in the gorilla’s coarse black fur, and then Jake is sobbing, sobbing apologies and pleas and things Marco can’t even make out against his chest, and Marco gives up on the whole demorphing thing and just picks his best friend up and holds him close. Jake is a big guy – he always was, and the war gave only benefits in that – but Marco is a gorilla. Gorillas can give anyone a hug – even their fearless leader. Especially their fearless leader.

Jake winds down to hiccupping unevenly before he chokes out, “Ugh, ‘t _fucking hurts_.”

{Try the kitten again,} Marco soothes. {We’ll bring you back in a bit, though, alright? You have to come back.}

Jake nods against his stomach, his fist tightening in reassurance before he closes his eyes and begins to shrink, and in a moment Marco is snuggling a ball of calico fur again. The kitten is calmer though, and seems content to just sit within the cavern of his arms. {Why’d you do it, Jake?} Marco asks softly.

Jake pops an eye open. {Do what?}

{Ax says you have to almost get stuck to lose control of your morph.} Marco shifts. {A lot.}

His friends shrinks a little. {I…}

{I just don’t understand,} Marco murmurs. {You know we love you, right? You know I’d kill anyone that even tried to hurt you?}

Jake is silent for a long moment, and then he says ,{I killed Tom.}

Marco stills. He can’t believe he’s almost forgotten, in the insanity of the past months, about Tom. {No you didn’t.}

{I gave the order. It was my order. It was my decision that he died.}

{Jake, we all would have-}

{My parents lost a son.}

It hits Marco then, what’s really going on, and he’s suddenly so angry he doesn’t know what to do. Jake yowls at him, and he realizes that he may possibly be crushing his best friend’s kitten body a second too late, but Jake should be saying _I lost a brother_ , if anything. _I lost my brother_. This isn’t Jake’s pain.

_My parents lost a son._

{ _They told you that?!?_ } Marco demands, and Jake-kitten skitters out of his arms like a – well, like a startled kitten. Marco is livid, though. How dare they? How _dare_ they? {Have they _honestly_ been using that one on you? _That’s what you go home to??_ }

{Marco,} Jake says weakly. {Come on, it’s not their fault. They lost-}

{ _THEY STILL HAVE A SON!_ } Marco roars. { _They still have a son that saved the entire fucking world!_ They have a son who is _brave_ , who’s a _genius_ and a _leader_ and a _tactician_ and who can still love a bunch of effed up rejects with too much PTSD and anger and ugliness inside them.} He sits down again, hard, unaware that he even stood up, and whispers, { _They have a son who saved the world and could still love me_.}

Jake is demorphing again, and Marco follows, and when he sits up a human boy he ends up with an armful of Jake again – a normal-sized armful, but it doesn’t matter so much that Jake doesn’t quite fit, because Jake’s mouth is on his neck and his arms are around his ribs so hard it hurts even though Jake’s hands are shaking, and Jake is whispering things Marco might never hear again – “ _…course I love you so much you idiot stupid idiot never going to leave Marco shh please shhh…_ ” and Marco might possibly be crying and Jake is crying and he’s aware, in some distant part of his brain, that they are two guys wearing spandex entwined in the middle of the road, but he doesn’t care. Let them see. Let the whole world see that this is love – because Jake understands Marco, down to the infinitesimal details that make him up, he understands everything that Marco could never tell his parents, and Jake still loves him.

His parents love him, and have been putting on a big show of loving him, but that isn’t the kind of love that will last.

This is.

They’re both still boys this time when the others find them, even if they have both calmed down considerably. Jake is too weak to fly, so he morphs back into his kitten and Rachel carries him back to Cassie’s. She threatens to claw out anyone’s face who tries to do it, so they let her carry him even if they say it’s because her bird morph is the biggest. Jake is calmer now, and when Ax asks about the kitten morph – they’ve all seen the dead kitten by that point, but no one brings it up – Jake says he was flying and saw it get hit, but by the time he demorphed it was dying, and he only absorbed the morph to take away its pain. The kitten had looked so peaceful when it died, he said, that he had to try. The morph never came out peaceful, so he tried again. Then for longer. Then almost stayed. Just to try.

They sleep in a pile in Cassie’s barn, and in the morning they’ll go and yell at Jake’s parents, but they know it won’t be the same. They all have their families, and they all love their families, but their families love versions of themselves that don’t exist anymore. They love their straight-A kids and their pretty little daughters, their future lawyers and even their famous children.

That’s not real love.

This is.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Surrender](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1196106) by [Poetry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry)




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